Far From Brooklyn

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Holy shit, this is a good book.

I would have said Victor Pelevin was the undisputed king of post-Soviet fiction, but now I know who the queen is.

Petrushevskaya is like some kind of crazy transfiguration of Poe, Gogol, and the Brothers Grimm. The stories feel like classic fairy tales – characters get lost in the woods, strangers knock on doors, old women live “once upon a time.” But there’s nothing fey or phony about the stories, and they feature modern contrivances even as they call to mind ancient folk tales.  A girl lost in the woods is wearing a track suit. An enormously fat woman who has had a magical spell cast over her (actually, her and her sister, trapped in a single, hence fat, body) is offered a contract to appear in a diet ad campaign. Modernity mixes easily and seamlessly with the classical.  It’s an amazing combination.

The writing and the tale-spinning is incredibly compact and efficient.  “Marilena’s Secret” – this is the story of the cursed sisters trapped in a single body – has far more plot than the entirety of the dreadful “Life of Pi,” and it is all of 19 pages long.  It’s a truly complete experience – it would be a wonderful movie, full of adventure and evil magicians and star-crossed lovers.

Many of the stories flirt with the truly grotesque, and as a somewhat squeamish reader still feeling a bit pummeled by my experience with “2666,” I was nervous that Petrushevska might shade too far – but she never does.  She walks that line.

Amazing.

Photo credit: Painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. via Wikimedia Commons